Art is a microcosm of civilization. If, as Plato was to say, justice
consists in a certain ordering of parts according to their nature,
then art is an idealization of this arrangement, one anticipating its
coming into being. Pieces of the whole are found naturally there,
manifesting themselves as such a part. An aesthetic manifesting the
idea of justice is the human intellect striving to realize the pieces
of a whole subsumed under the concept of justice itself. Both the parts
and the whole are shown as manifesting what they truly are. Art, as
Plato would not say, is an understanding of justice as an idealization
of the real. These are two quite distinct things. The former is the
anticipation of the Good under the medium of an artistic expression.
The expression itself takes its beginning from the concept of justice
itself. The latter takes its starting point from the real, from natural
objects and states of affairs. By “idealization” one means the concept
of justice itself, a concept immortalized in the definition of Logos,
or the arrangement of elements forming a whole. Art seeks the elements
of justice within natural objects, and attempts to bring out its
defining features in ways currently not socially grasped. Artistic
creation is the ability to see potential for further ethical growth in
the natural and social order. It is the realization of essence, if only
in symbolic form. Art can find no separation from this. Art apart from
the Logos is degeneracy.

The lack of vision in modern art is one of the most painful and most
obvious signs of American and Western social collapse. It is such that
even the most untrained minds can see the lack of any hope in
society’s most subtle modes of self-expression. Art is a window to
society, and much can be learned through an examination of art, or the
collective social expression. Much is learned about social cohesion and
collective values through art. Classical Byzantium and its successor
state, Imperial Russia —perhaps two of the most healthy societies in
world history—expressed themselves in that antithesis of decadence,
iconography. Iconography is the aesthetic of counterrevolution. Even at
the start of the “Enlightened” revolution with Thomas Hobbes and the
Renaissance (of which he was the intellectual apogee), art had an
evocative nature, even a transformative one. However fleshy, sensual,
and hyper- realistic, Gothia showed mankind at its essence, in a
powerful relationship with the Creator of all things —humanity, that
is, as reaching fulfillment only in such a relationship. Mankind’s
essence as a rational being is actualized only in communion with its
creator. Religious art was the poetry of the soul, in that it could
transcend the mundane and show mankind’s final resting place. This was
the repose of the human soul, and poetry could capture it as
theological speculation never could. This is the aesthetic of the
liturgy, and even of scripture itself.

After the great El Greco attempted the fusion of the icon with
Western realism—certainly one of the greatest experiments in art
history—the residual transcendent understanding of art had a rather
short life. As liberalism and utilitarianism took over the realm of
ethics, art no longer had any metaphysical base from which to proceed.
Decadence and decay were soon to follow.

If art is the expression of the Logos, or the arrangement of
elements in a whole according to the fullness of their essence, then
modernity was the death of art. The ideology of modernity declared that
essences were non-existent. Following the ideas of the English
Schoolman, William of Occam, Enlightenment philosophy considered
objects as merely a bundle of properties. An essence was merely
something invented by the observer to make sense out of the properties
themselves, to bring unity to that which was brought to the senses.
Essences had no independent existence. There were no “objects” strictly
considered, but merely an understanding of universal causality. There
was no central purpose to man, the human intellect was reduced to a
bundle offeelings and impulses. No art worthy of the name can proceed
from such a psychology.

It was mankind, according to Francis Bacon and John Locke, that was
to impart meaning to objects, rather than science being a study of
objects in themselves. Rationality, vis-à-vis a just social order,
concerned the scientific establishment applying the understanding of
universal causality to the social realm—the birth of the social
sciences, reaching its apogee in Comte. The concept of a social science
was the elite arrangement of social entities (self-moving pieces of
matter idealized into “human beings”) in such a way that the response
to stimuli was to lead the entities in the preordained direction —it
was the social planners who were to define justice, and, if the human
intellect was a fiction, then all that was needed was a skillful
manipulation of sentiments and impulses. The greatest and most
unfortunate expression of this idea is within the pages of Hobbes’s
Leviathan (1651).

The effect on aesthetics was nothing short of revolutionary. With
the concept of an object fully expressing its essence now dissipated in
Enlightenment social science, objects were merely to reflect the moods
and drives of the viewer. Classical art was not something that
essentially extended from the intellect of the artist, or, more
accurately, the sentiments and “will to power” of the artist, but from
the object itself, the object expressing an intrinsic essence through
the medium of the intellect.

That essence being fully actualized in direct communion with God is
the very aesthetic of iconography, reflecting faithfully the philosophy
of a fully Christian social order as well as a Christian psychology.
The iconographer, usually a monastic, would fast for extended periods
of time before attempting to capture this concept. Fasting was to
release the spirit at the expense of the flesh, bringing the artist
into a fuller communion with the essence of all essences, pure being
itself, God. This is the aesthetics of the spirit, the aesthetics of
Christian civilization.

Enlightenment social science created an aesthetic that merely
reflected the drives of the artist, for there was no essence to be
actualized, no spirit to soar above the ever earthbound flesh. Art
became the “idealization” of the piece of matter-in-motion of the
Leviathan. Mankind was expressed in art, eventually, as the tortured
and imprisoned bundle of passions at the mercy of drives. Soon, this
idea was to reach its fullness in the Existentialist school; that
school of thought that still haunts Western man to this day. Art and
music began to express dread and fear. Mankind had no purpose and the
universe was absurd, but man was still forced to make moral judgments,
still forced to live in society and cherish his pathetic modicum of
earthly contentment.

There can be no question, with exceptions such as Goya, that the
Enlightenment ushered in the age of decadence in aesthetics. No longer
was the human form illumined from outside, but humanity was seen,
following the Weltgeist of scientism, to possess this for itself, as
itself. This myth was not to last long. Mankind, quite the contrary
from proving it was the bearer of the “divine spark,” showed that it
was capable of the basest evil. Such ideas came into painfully sharp
focus as World War I began.

Artistic creation was to become blurrier and blurrier as humanity
was severed from any transcendent purpose. By the end of the nineteenth
century, van Gogh, Sickert, Seurat, Prikker, van de Velde, and so many
others had severed humanity from its origin—and, explicitly so, had
Gauguin. Mankind was not renewed, as in classical iconography and
sculpture, but distorted, taken away from its transcendent origin and
place of repose; the human form became the plaything of arbitrary will.
Art became the idealization of the bureaucracy. Ovid’s Metamorphosis
had reasserted itself in the age of the social sciences. The onslaught
of Comte, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, as well as their famous
predecessors such as de Sade and LeMettrie, posited man not only as
lacking purpose and ethical basis, but subject to forces beyond human
control. Humanity became something to administer, to regulate, to place
in arbitrary units for its own good. This culminated in the communes
of Paris and in the collectivization of the Soviet period.

The will of the artist imitated the will of the bureaucrat and the
will of the industrialist. The structures of modern social science
replaced the human essence as the final resting place of artistic
creation. If

mankind was to be manipulated according to its passions, impulses,
and drives (the only realities in modern psychology), then it became an
inevitability that art reflected the powers of the new order. Art Deco
became the symbol of bureaucratic art, the art of the social
scientist, the aesthetic expression of John Dewey and John Maynard
Keynes.

World War I, of course, eliminated the human form altogether, giving
birth to a true Existentialism, one that is still the official creed
of the modern mass man. The destruction of the aristocracy, by those
who protected classical culture (in, however, a vulgar fashion), came
simultaneously with the destruction of the human form in aesthetics. It
was just a few years until Picasso distorted the human form by
following the ebb and flow of his own libido—the very apogee of
arbitrary, that is, non-rational, will in art. E. Michael Jones, in his
Degenerate Moderns, clearlyshows Picasso as merely being the
reflection of his own sexual lust and extremely short attention span.

The connection with Enlightenment—and Existentialist—metaphysics
should be clear. The manipulation of the properties of the human form,
truly the only relevant subject of artistic creation given the demise
of the human essence (or the human form in the highest sense), became
the only purpose of artistic creation, reflecting fully the
bureaucratization of social life in accord with the final victories of
the social sciences and their patron, the techno-bureaucratic and
industrialized state. As masses of humanity were herded to death in war
and into the factories, art reflected this new reality in the lifeless
and meaningless depictions of mankind. Dostoevsky’s Notes from
Underground (1864) became one of the greatest artistic creations of
social protest, both affirming and denying human freedom and the human
intellect, depicting a mankind that both loved and hated freedom, or
the idea that mankind possesses an intellect.

On the other side of the canvas, art was exemplified by the drives
and carnal desires of the artist. The Enlightenment had won and mankind
was now completely a material object, a purposeless, functionless blob
of desires and passions meant to be shaped into a harmonious whole by
the scientist and the bureaucrat. Art had followed the new idea of
mankind as well as the new idea of justice.

All of this falls into the perennial danger of the essayist, that
is, a stultifying simplicity, and one that I admit. A solid essayist,
however, is interested in essences, not in chronology. I notice one
interesting thing, however. As the human form was gradually destroyed
between 1890 and 1918—though the origins go back at least to the early
Enlightenment—the concept of sculpture remained highly realistic and
romantic, with horrible exceptions like Rosso. People like von
Hildebrand and Gerome did maintain a classical understanding of
sculpture. Dalou in sculpture and Liszt in music may well have found a
second but not entirely unrelated spur to the glorification of the
human form in the idea of the nation.

Dalou’s Triumph of the Republic (1899), however much it included
that prostitute “goddess” of reason at its head (the ever present
revolutionary symbol and a mockery of human rationality, and indeed its
death sentence), finds its clarity in the idea of the nation. Hegel’s
concept of the nation as the divine- historical manifested on earth, or
the concept in all its terrestrial fullness, may have well breathed
new life into the concept of humanity and its eternal purpose. The idea
of the nation, particularly in its more conservative aspects, created a
super- reason of the national patrimony. It created a new man, the
nation, or the collective man, from which art could spring. One must
understand, however, that even this was not to last. The wars of the
twentieth century put an end to that.

We need look no further than Picabia’s Girl Born Without a Mother
(1915) to find the final guttering out of Western aesthetics. Mankind
has completely become a machine, and the traditions of the past no
longer existent for European humanity. The lack of a “mother” was not
only the lack of an intelligible patrimony but also the
consummation—long anticipated by Hobbes—of fear into a fundamental idea
of human life. This fear was the fear of Existentialism: the existence
of moral ideas in a person supposed

to be merely material; the absurdist contradiction between mankind
as allegedly material with the idea that mankind can consider the
future. This was the fundamental contradiction of modernism and the
fullest explanation of the fear that gripped twentieth-century
man—reflected faithfully by the Existentialists. It finally took Toorop
and Brauner to view humans—including themselves—as corpses, or at
least as possessing a corpse-like countenance. Mankind without an
essence, mankind without a final and transcendent purpose, mankind as
being merely a bundle of properties (externally) and a bundle of
passions (internally) showed itself to the artist as form without a
life, function without a purpose. The corpse became the living symbol of
Enlightenment philosophy through its art.

The simple fact of meaning here is that modernity has made it
intolerable to be human; Existentialism itself quickly followed upon
the debris of the broken promises of modern science. The promises of
the Enlightenment—well-placed by Goya and others—went unfulfilled as
science failed to impart meaning to the human community. Science was
never to replace what classical philosophy had, without exception,
understood: an intrinsic meaning and purpose to the human function and
form, or an understanding of function through the form.

Socialist realism rediscovered the human form buttressed by
ideology, but art on orders from the state cannot be interpreted except
through the demands of the state system itself, and contains nothing
but the ever present demands for propaganda only. Indeed, art in the
twentieth century reflected the socialist school in that it was a
product of the New Order of mass capital and state manipulation. The
proof of this can be found in the dragooning of art into the service of
mass advertising, reflecting, in the most vulgar way imaginable, a
mankind that the scientific class considered as merely a tool for the
enrichment of mass capital and as cannon-fodder for the newly formed
and entrenched total warfare state.

Socialist realism understood the classical function of art much
better than the various schools at the time. For Marxism, art was the
reaching for human justice, a fullness of man’s “being”—a “being” that
was entirely self-created through the various new technologies. It
stood to reason, however, that once “paradise” had come to earth, art
lost its function; it was merely to report what it had seen, for there
was nothing to “idealize” since ideals were already manifested within
the socialist state. Thus, ordinary human forms doing ordinary human
things became the sole domain of artistic expression, in other words,
socialism had claimed to have transcended art in bringing it into
reality. The socialist state system, then, demanded the dissemination
of “realism” in art to show, if nothing else, that the paradise had
indeed arrived on earth. Socialist realism is a necessary outgrowth of
socialist theory, and served not the reality of socialist life, but
merely the demands for propaganda by the socialist elite.

What, then, is the aesthetic of counterrevolution? It is the
perennial aesthetic of the icon. What makes this the rock of
anesthetics—a true aesthetic of civility—is its vision of human
destiny, a final repose outside of earthly desires and fleshly
passions. It was the eros of Plato rather than the erotica of Picasso.
Humanity does not contain its “own light,” as the neo-gnostic
Enlightenment assured us; nor does science have the ability to recreate
the “divine spark” in its own image. The classical aesthetic of the
apostolic Christian world is that humanity, first, is fallen, and,
second, is capable, through communion with the Creator, of recapturing
the glory of his nature manifested to the fullest extent. This is the
aesthetic of iconography. The psychology of iconography is to be found
in the final victory of the spirit (or the upper reaches of the
intellect in Orthodox Christian theology) over the flesh. This victory
is not found in the radical suppression of the flesh, as the ancient
gnostics taught, but rather in that fundamentally Orthodox notion of the
transfiguration of the flesh.

What Plato understood, in spite of himself, was that the flesh was
an intrinsic part of the human person. His view of justice was not the
elimination of the flesh, but rather its being brought into subjection
to powers that are naturally superior to it. The spirit and intellect
were, by nature, superior to the flesh in that they could generalize
about natural contingency and understand the universal hidden therein.
Only

then could the flesh find its proper function in the world. The
passions, or the active principle of the flesh, were not to be
eliminated, but placed in the service of the intellect. This is the
psychology of civility, and was productive of an artistic vision that
idealized the final victory of the spirit.

One must, however, not forget the idea of the nation. The very
concept of the Christian collective, reinforced by its national idea,
is the true spur for considering the eventual human glorification in
the super-nation of heaven. Following Vladimir Soloviev, artistic
beauty is the divine light penetrating the material humanity. One can
extrapolate, first, the idea of the nation as the material condition
for the divine penetration, collectively speaking, of divine grace, and
second, the Christian society as its light. The life of the nation, in
other words, can be transformed by the church, and society can become
actually Christian. Christian society takes on the look of a large
church, and it is the light of Mount Tabor that makes a nation a
theological organization rather than merely a mundane one, as Saint
Augustine taught.

This is to say that, if the entire collective is transformed, there
is no object of nature that cannot be considered transfigured, and
thus, a thing of beauty. Beauty for those like Soloviev and the
classical tradition in general follows from the Holy Transfiguration of
Christ. Art represents the transfiguration of nature. It is not the
slavish imitation of nature, nor is it its nullification, but rather
its fulfillment. This is the purpose of art, this is the artistic
genius. Justice, then, is the Christianization of the collective
because only it can redeem man from his intrinsic fallenness,
manifested by the predominance of human passion and impulse. Justice
follows from the Transfiguration, for only when the flesh of man and
his community is transformed can mankind live as he should, according
to his essence.

But if nature is to be receptive of this transformation, then the
collectivity itself must be transformed. This is to say that the
society in general must be dedicated to manifesting the supremacy of
the spiritual and intellectual over the carnal. The Christian nation,
then, becomes a work of art, for it is the transfiguration of social
life. It is the idealization of the famous seal of the Byzantine
Empire, or the two-headed eagle, the joining of the mundane to the
spiritual in one transformative and transformed unity, the highest
aspiration of social theory.

Even the architecture of the church itself speaks of the idea of the
Transfiguration. The church itself, in its state closest to the
ground, or the earth, is square. This represents the mundane world with
its boundaries, pain, limitations. Above it and expressing a unity
with the square is the dome, and within it, the icon of the
Pantocrator, the creator and maintainer of all things. The divine
circle rests upon the human square. The circle transforms the
limitations of the mundane world, making pain and limitation necessary
ingredients to one’s spiritual transformation, itself a precursor to
the final glorification of the church in heaven. The altar itself is
always a square (tetrapod), while the body of Christ, offered upon it,
is in the form of bread baked in a circle. The circle has no beginning
or end, while the square is well defined by its intrinsic limitations.

The lack of the rational state of justice—the transformed human
collective—is the end of artistic creation worthy of the name. If the
collective is not dedicated to this state of affairs, or the
spiritualization of the collective, then nature cannot be seen as
transfigured, but merely as the object of human desire. This is the
very definition of decadence and is the ground for abstraction—or the
nullification of nature—in artistic creation. Nature is “conquered” by
the spirit and made to be seen anew, as expressing value in itself.
Outside of this, nature is viewed as Locke viewed it, merely a means to
mankind’s passions.

Nature can be three things in artistic representation: abstract,
real, or transfigured. Imitating nature as it is makes little sense—no
one needs an artist for this, but merely eyes. This is the art of
socialist realism that claims that idealization is unnecessary because
the ideal is now the real. Abstraction is the view of nature as the
object of technical manipulation, nature as nullified, subject to
outside powers.

Transformation is the glorification, through the light of the
Transfiguration, of nature to its original state, a state of
cooperation, abundance, and humanness.

This is the meaning of art, and it has a spiritual as well as social
component. The social life is to reflect the Church in its demand for
the supreme rule of the spiritual and the intellectual, as the Church
imparts the grace needed to make this a reality, not a part of the
dreams of the Platonists or the Stoa. The church is the true spur to
art in its fullness in that it is the mystical body of Christ itself,
thus redeeming us from our base passions. Humanity can finally be
represented in its wholeness, in its place of repose. In classical
times this ideal existed, but remained a distant object of speculation,
something Plato painfully took to his grave. There was no “bridge”
between the current passionate state of humanity and the ideal of the
rational life. This is, further, the aesthetic of counterrevolution,
the art of anti-decadence, the art against carnality.

Simply put, then, art is about transformation, collective as well as
natural. The Christian nation is an icon of heaven, as the monarch is
the icon of Christ; it is the transformation of collective life. Art
seeks to capture this transformation and present it to those who find
difficulty in comprehending a mass transformation as a theological
matter. Christian faith, in its highest and most complete expression,
is a collective phenomenon; when it becomes an individual phenomenon
solely, the end of Christian society is near if not present. The nation
has, in both East and West, been the repository of the Christian
collective. Its health—as Blessed Augustine was to say—is the health of
the Church. Both are necessary to the transformation of human life,
and thus, to the existence of true art. The light of Tabor enlightens
and transfigures the collective life as the national expression
encourages all to acts of penance and repentance. Christianity does not
exist with a series of monasteries or hermitages alone, but as a
vibrant collective phenomenon in the nation taking on the externals of a
Church in itself. The nation participates within the mystical body of
Christ on earth, and is not something foreign to it. This is the
beginning of transfiguration, and also the impetus to aesthetics. It is
the aesthetics of civility, the aesthetics of the new man.